Originally Posted by
Truthanator
While I admire your vision and share some of your reason, the reality is that E175's will still be flying 20 years from now. If you really believe that the company and the union will somehow decide to bring all of those airplanes over to mainline, well that's awesome too.
Time's do change, and WAG'ing about the future is a poor life strategy as well.
Also, Uber and Lyft are taxis. So taxis are still incredibly necessary.
A huge number of them driven by former taxi drivers. How does that relate to mainline farming out flying to regional airlines for cheaper costs? Why would airlines suddenly decide to pay A319 crews to do TUS-DEN when they can pay E175 crews less than half to provide the exact same level of service?
Yeah, 50 seat RJ's are eventually going to be negligible (still 10+ years away and flown by regionals) but if you think all of that 76 feed is all coming back within the next 20 years, I have a sweet beach house to sell you.
First of all, its not 1/2 the cost. Second of all, its not the “exact same service”. Nobody would rather fly on an RJ than a mainline jet. Oscar even said it on CNBC. He said passengers rejected RJs and left for other carriers. Pilot costs are only 8% of the total operation, so paying a pilot a little less doesn’t really change the cost that much. We could easily do what SK wants to do with the guppy 700s they canceled.